No doubt about it, the Vatican’s latest missive has laid an egg. Styled as an encyclical to assist national bishops conferences in developing guidelines for dealing with clergy accused of sexual abuse, the letter utterly ignores what everybody outside the Church hierarchy itself acknowledges to be the central problem: the bishops themselves.

Take Philadelphia, please. The U.S. bishops conference didn’t merely have guidelines, it had Vatican-approved norms–which were ignored by Cardinal Justin Rigali and his henchmen. As for the archdiocesan review board, tasked with reviewing all cases, it was kept in the dark and then used to provide cover for episcopal misbehavior, according to its chair, Ana Maria Catanzano. That’s the problem in a nutshell.

Always eager to safeguard its prerogatives, the Vatican insists that if the conferences want to go beyond guidelines and actually establish “binding norms,” then “it will be necessary to request the recognitio from the competent Dicasteries of the Roman Curia.” OK, let’s go with that.

To deal with the problem of recalcitrant bishops, the conferences should be obliged to establish binding norms, which norms must include a zero tolerance policy for bishops, comparable to the American zero tolerance policy for priests. That is to say, if there is credible evidence that a bishop has covered up a case of clerical sexual abuse, he will be suspended from office by Rome, and removed if the case is proved. Assuming Rome wants to get the bishops’ attention, that’s the two-by-four that would get it.

About the Author

Mark Silk
Mark Silk is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America.» Posts by Mark SilkMore »

Mark Silk

Mark Silk graduated from Harvard College in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in medieval history from Harvard University in 1982. After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.